Founding Software Engineer | San Francisco (On-site, Full Time) | Up to US$300,000 + Equity (0.1% to 1%)
Some jobs let you join a company.
This one lets you help build it.
One of Big Wave Digital’s premier AI startup clients is assembling a small, elite engineering team in San Francisco. They’ve developed cutting-edge AI technology tackling complex unstructured data problems and are now entering a rapid growth phase.
This is one of those rare opportunities where your fingerprints will be on everything. The product, architecture, engineering culture, deployment strategy, scalability, reliability and technical standards.
You’ll work directly with founders, researchers and some exceptionally smart people solving genuinely difficult technical challenges.
No layers of management. No endless meetings. No maintaining legacy systems built ten years ago.
Just building ambitious technology from the ground up and taking it into the hands of enterprise customers.
What You’ll Be Building
You’ll own backend systems and infrastructure that power next-generation AI applications at scale. Think:
- Distributed backend systems
- High-throughput, low-latency services
- Cloud-native architecture
- Production AI infrastructure
- Enterprise deployments
- Reliability, observability and scalability
You’ll help take ideas from whiteboard sketches and research prototypes all the way through to production systems used by real customers.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Architecting and building scalable backend platforms
- Designing distributed systems that can handle serious workloads
- Owning cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines and production environments
- Building Kubernetes-based platforms and deployment frameworks
- Creating monitoring, observability and reliability tooling
- Driving CI/CD best practices across engineering
- Working closely with founders to make critical technical decisions
- Helping shape the engineering culture from day one
- Scaling systems from startup MVP through enterprise-grade deployments
You’ll Probably Have
- Strong Python engineering experience
- Experience building production-grade backend systems
- Solid knowledge of distributed systems and scalable architectures
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and containerised deployments
- AWS, GCP or Azure expertise
- Experience with Terraform, Pulumi or infrastructure-as-code tooling
- Strong understanding of system performance, monitoring and reliability
- A genuine builder mentality and ownership mindset
Bonus Points
- Rust or C++
- AI, ML or LLM infrastructure experience
- GPU-heavy workload experience
- Experience supporting enterprise deployments
- Startup or founding engineer experience
Why This Role Is Special
Because opportunities to become employee #5, #10 or #15 don’t come around every day.
You’ll have direct influence over product direction, technical architecture and company growth. The engineering decisions you make today will still be shaping the company years from now.
And alongside a highly competitive salary package, you’ll receive meaningful equity, giving you the chance to participate in the upside you’re helping create.
The Package
- Up to US$300,000 salary
- Equity from 0.1% to 1%
- Full health insurance
- Company laptop
- Food and transport credits
- Visa sponsorship available
- Based in San Francisco
- Full-time, onsite
If you’re the type of engineer who likes ownership, autonomy, technical complexity and building things that matter, we’d love to have a conversation. Apply below, or reach out to Big Wave Digital, the boutique AI and technology recruitment agency handling this search.
